Free The Wayfinders by Wade Davis Page A

participate fully, to the extent
possible, in the daily lives of the people they studied. Every effort should
be made, he argued, to understand the perspective of the other, to learn the
way they perceive the world, and if at all possible, the very nature of
their thoughts. This demanded, by definition, a willingness to step back
from the constraints of one’s own prejudices and preconceptions. This notion
of cultural relativism was a radical departure, as unique in its way as was
Einstein’s theory of relativity in the discipline of physics. Everything
Boas proposed ran against orthodoxy. It was a shattering of the European
mind, and ever since, anthropologists have periodically been accused of
embracing an extreme relativism, as if every human behaviour must be
accepted simply because it exists. In truth, no serious anthropologist
advocates the elimination of judgment. Anthropology merely calls for its
suspension, so that the judgments we are all ethically obliged to make as
human beings may be informed ones.
    For Franz Boas, the moment of epiphany came in
the winter of 1883 during his first ethnographic trip to Baffin Island.
Caught in a winter blizzard in temperatures that dropped to minus 46 degrees
Celsius, his party became disoriented in the darkness. For twenty-six hours
they pounded on by sled, Boas abandoning his fate to his Inuk companion and
the dogs. Eventually they secured shelter, “half frozen and half starved.”
Boas was glad to be alive. The following morning he wrote in his diary, “I
often ask myself what advantages our good society possesses over that of the
‘savages’ and find, the more I see of their customs, that we have no right
to look down on them… . We have no right to blame them for their forms and
superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us. We highly educated people are
much worse, relatively speaking.”
    Boas established the template for ethnographic
research, and his example inspired those who would go on to create the
modern discipline of anthropology. The goal of the anthropologist is “to
grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his
vision of his world.” These words, which could have come from Boas, were
actually written forty years later by Bronislaw Malinowski, an aristocratic
Pole at the London School of Economics, who had taken ethnographic fieldwork
to quite another level of commitment. At a time when economics implied the
theories of either Karl Marx or Adam Smith, Malinowski turned everything
upside down, challenging conventional ideas about the nature of wealth, and
the purpose and meaning of exchange, even as he revealed the dynamics of a
contemporary oceanic trading network so vast and complex that it offered
clues as to the very forces that ultimately led to the settlement of the
Pacific Ocean.
    Stranded in Melanesia by the outbreak of the
First World War, Malinowski had spent two years in the Trobriand Islands, an
archipelago of flat coral reefs and islands located some 250 kilometres
northeast of Papua New Guinea. The inhabitants, perhaps 10,000 at the time,
were, in his words, “merry, talkative and easy going,” with artistic skills
that placed them “culturally, in the first rank of Melanesian tribes.” A
gifted linguist, Malinowski quickly mastered their language and went to
work, readily discerning the broad outlines of the culture.
    The people lived in villages, and were largely
dependent on their gardens, with the primary crop being the yam, the
cultivation and harvest of which determined the ebb and flow of the social
and ritual cycles of the year. Descent was matrilineal. There were four
recognized clans, who had birds, animals, and plants as linked totems. The
islands were divided into a number of political units, each dominated by a
male leader. Though conflict was endemic, wars had precise rules and battles
were mostly theatrical displays of spears and shields.
    The division between men and women struck
Malinowski as